Varieties of Manhood

By Andrew O'Hagan

Published: November 16, 2003

WHAT WE LOST

By Dale Peck.

229 pp. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin Company. $23.

NOBODY likes to say so, but when gay men write about fatherhood they are often ruminating about manhood. The reasons for this should be obvious: gay men's experience of fatherhood generally stops at having, or having had, a father, and being a father oneself can usually be considered an absent possibility. An absence isn't the same as a loss, and, to a great many, not fathering children may be one of life's happier outcomes. Nevertheless it is true that some gay writers experience the question in complicated ways, as if their sexuality implied an explicit foreshortening of their own presence.

Gay writers in America have fought so many important battles with tradition -- and put such energy into being proud -- that the fatherhood point may seem moot, but I doubt it would seem so to Dale Peck, who has written, in ''What We Lost,'' a personal, nonfictional disquisition on manhood that masquerades as a portrait of an idyllic period in his father's childhood. Peck is the author of three novels, and he has become well-known for his slash-and-burn book reviews in magazines like The New Republic. His new book is written in two parts, the first being what might be called an imaginative reconstruction of Peck Sr.'s adventures at an uncle's farm in upstate New York in the 1950's, with regular flashbacks to the life of poverty, alcoholism, parental abuse and bullying that he left behind at the family home on Long Island. The book's second part goes on to describe a visit made by the Pecks, père et fils, in July 2001, to the same part of the world as the farm, a visit that brings out some kind of empathy in the author, a near recognition of the shape of his father's life and his own place in it.

Peck Sr. makes a likable junior, and we are on his side as his own boozy, estranged father removes him from the one-room house he shares with his seven siblings, borrowing a brother's boots and journeying in the night to a vague destination that soon becomes clear. At the farm, the boy is at first resisted by Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bessie, but he proves a good worker and a quick learner and is soon loved by them and tolerated by the other farmhands. Wallace eventually tells him about his father's uselessness, and about the mess of his father's past. ''Your father is a farmer,'' he says. ''Just not a good one. He ran our place into the ground. Or didn't run it you could say. Drank it away's more like it.'' Peck Sr. doesn't really know his father -- he knows he works at the Pilgrim State Mental Hospital -- but Wallace tells the story of his brother's first wife, and of a previous child they had called Dale Peck. ''Another Dale Peck,'' Wallace says. ''When you was born your father give you the same name.'' The news has a bad effect. ''All of a sudden the boy is out of breath. . . . Dale, the first one. The old man's firstborn son.''

The book dwells on such progenitive matters, on the different Dale Pecks before the author and ultimately -- though quite invisibly -- on the fact that there will be no more Dale Pecks to come after him. Peck tries to evoke the life of the farm, and the narrative often mists over with bucolic contentment, but it becomes increasingly odd to notice how he really has no interest in rural experience. (He misspells ''Ayrshire'' cows all the way through the book, four times on one page.) It is not really a book about his father's farming episode at all, but a rather oblique account of Dale Peck's grapplings with the notion of male authority. Peck wants to get closer to his father, so imagines him at his most vulnerable, as a lonely child in a strange environment.

His father's boyhood contained this promise of another life, a life that is snatched away, and it seems to be part of the author's point that the farm offered his father a way to become somebody other than his father, to stay in a kind of Paradise and become a different man. But we see that the nonrural life was to be Peck Sr.'s destiny, and rural innocence is swept away by the force of something brutal waiting at home. The author's grandfather is a fairly vivid study in pathetic, maladjusted masculinity, and the best scene in the book occurs once Peck Sr. is back on Long Island, a night when he and his brother beat their father up in the forest and steal his money. The old man begs for mercy and the boys run off. Later, Dale is called out of bed by his mother to watch the father's second humiliation, being slapped around by the police who brought him home. The father ends the evening lying facedown in a puddle of his own urine. ''The boy just stares at him. He does not know what he feels. He is so overwhelmed by emotions he feels numb, but then suddenly one thought emerges clearly: he wishes he had never left the farm.''

There's a nice short story in all of this, whimpering to be left alone, but Peck appears determined to spin the interesting play of feelings here into another orbit. He is able, from time to time, to display a certain delicacy -- ''A few nights ago he was so impressed by the sight of his biceps in the bathroom mirror that he kissed them'' -- but much of the time the writing is simply careless, showing a tendency to name things that are already well enough evoked. There is some Truman Capote or James Agee-type material in the story Peck wishes to tell, but he has neither writer's reportorial eye, and he tolerates verbal redundancies. We have ''half light'' twice in four pages; our protagonist lies in a room as ''cold as an ice cube''; he cradles his boots ''in his arms like a baby.'' In Part 2, when the Pecks come to share a meal with one of the former farmhands and his family, we hear of ''bits of biography salting the meal like a condiment.'' This is just hopeless, this ''like a condiment.'' If something salts the meal, it salts the meal.

Peck has a real theme, but he shies away from it, and the fine writing he musters can often seem unattached to the book's real concerns. He ought to have dug deeper. In Part 2, as Dale Peck Sr., now an old man, sits with his son in the country kitchen of a kind young woman named Gloria Hull, notions of fatherhood and childhood and love are hanging in the air, but mainly they remain floating that way, untethered, and are never quite gathered into meaning. ''You never did like ice tea,'' his father says. ''Too Kansas for you. Too country. My son's a city boy himself. Lives down in New York City, works as a writer.'' Meanwhile, Peck watches his father working himself out in front of the strangers, and he imagines a private conversation taking place between two girls, one saying to the other, ''Do you think the son's gay?''